Thanks to the high compression of the matrix product
state (MPS)
form of the wave function and the efficient site-by-site iterative
sweeping optimization algorithm, the density matrix normalization
group (DMRG) and its time-dependent variant (TD-DMRG) have been established
as powerful computational tools in accurately simulating the electronic
structure and quantum dynamics of strongly correlated molecules with
a large number (101–2) of quantum degrees of freedom
(active orbitals or vibrational modes). However, the quantitative
characterization of the quantum many-body behaviors of realistic strongly
correlated systems requires a further consideration of the interaction
between the embedded active subsystem and the remaining correlated
environment, e.g., a larger number (102–3) of external
orbitals in electronic structure or infinite condensed-phase phononic
modes in nucleus dynamics. To this end, we introduced three new post-DMRG
and TD-DMRG approaches, namely (1) DMRG2sCI-MRCI and DMRG2sCI-ENPT
by the reconstruction of selected configuration interaction (sCI)
type of compact reference function from DMRG coefficients and the
use of externally contracted MRCI (multireference configuration interaction)
and Epstein–Nesbet perturbation theory (ENPT), without recourse
to the expensive high order n-electron reduced density
matrices (n-RDMs). (2) DMRG combined with RR-MRCI
(renormalized residue-based MRCI), which improves the computational
accuracy and efficiency of internally contracted (ic) MRCI by renormalizing
the contracted bases with small-sized buffer environment(s) of a few
external orbitals as probes based on quantum information theory. (3)
HM (hierarchical mapping)-TD-DMRG in which a large environment is
reduced to a small number of renormalized environmental modes (which
accounts for the most vital system–environment interactions)
through stepwise mapping transformation. These advances extend the
efficacy of highly accurate DMRG/TD-DMRG computations to the quantitative
characterization of the electronic structure and quantum dynamics
in realistic strongly correlated systems coupled with large environments
and are reviewed in this paper.